Great ZX Spectrum Music

ZX Spectrum Music

We are talking about the original ZX Spectrum here (one of our favourite retro computers) or the slightly upgraded Spectrum plus. We are not including the Spectrum 128, the plus 2 or the plus 3 as they were blessed with the decent three channel AY sound chip.

Both machines (the Spectrum and the Spectrum plus) were blessed with a paltry 'single channel beeper' to generate sounds and music.

The beeper was installed by Sinclair to keep the production costs of the machine down - which really did help to make the ZX Spectrum a very affordable machine for many back in the day.

Because of this single channel beeper owners of other machines (who more often than not had a decent sound chip) would laugh and point at the Spectrum's 'poor' sound.

Well, clever developers managed to push the beeper way beyond it's capabilities and the good old Speccy actually managed to create some decent music.

Here are just a few example of what could be done....

Great ZX Spectrum music

The original ZX Spectrum was never designed to compose masterpieces

Hyperactive

Hyperactive was a free game which was given away on the front cover of Spectrum games magazine Sinclair User.

It is a sort of defender type arcade game which was developed by Spectrum programming legend Joffa Smith. For a free game it's not bad - and it was developed over a matter of only five days!

Keith Tinmans pumping menu tune is excellent - and probably one of the best Spectrum theme tune's ever created

Hyperactive

Fahrenheit 3000

Fahrenheit 3000 was a flick screen platform game (a tough one to complete I might add) from Perfection Software and is up there with the best of the platform genre.

The menu music was the famous Toccatta and Fugue in D Minor - and it doesn't sound too bad at all!

Tim Williams and Chris Jones did a great job with this game, but please note it is extremely tough!

Fahrenheit 3000

Cobra

Cobra was a very humourous side scrolling (with some of the best scrolling you would see on a ZX Spectrum) platform game which featured superb 2-channel music.

Drum beats overlayed by the melody tune was miraculous on the single channel beeper.

It was quite revolutionary back then and quite rightly garnered a lot of praise.

Cobra

Technician Ted

Technician Ted was one of the greatest flick screen platform games to grace the ZX Spectrum. It was polished, playable, slicky, addictive and technically impressive.

I will not to mention how difficult it was to complete!

Hewson managed to implement a nice version of The Blue Danube walz complete with vibrato and slide. Not bad at all and very easy on the ears.

Technician Ted

Uridium

Another one from Hewson - the classic scrolling space based shoot em up.

Hewson treated us to another polished and addictive game that was slick and professional.

The title music for this took the 'synthesizer' style of music that was popular in many Spectrum games. It's quite Catchy.

Uridium

Ping Pong

Ping Pong was a good conversion of the Konami arcade game by Doug Burns for Imagine Software. It is probably the only table tennis simulation that was released on the Spectrum.

More 2 channel wizardry from Martin Galway and Jof made the games menu screen far more interesting. Note the tunes ending!

Ping Pong

Chronos

Chronos was a good budget game released for the ZX Spectrum in 1987 by masters of the budget genre, Mastertronic.

Not only did the game feature decent scrolling arcade action (just what we want from our Spectrum Games) it had some of the most interesting title music to ever grace the machine.

The music to Chronos has an almost 'techno' quality to it - and really stretched the limitations of that humble beeper to the max!

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The Amiga Check-Mark

Left behind by 16-bits

Once the 16-bit machines really took over the home gaming front the less powerful 8-bit machines were slowly left behind.

The music that would grace many Amiga games took over (with the likes of Alister Brimble, Paul Van Der Valk and Chris Hulsbeck to name but a few) where the 8-bit machines left off.

Still, the way that clever developers pushed that single channel beeper to the limit lives on, and people are still finding new and interesting ways in which to make that single channel hardware sing. Amazing stuff.